DALLAS -- A few days before the start of the NHL Western Conference final, Detroit Red Wings coach Mike Babcock made a comment that few picked up on. It was about defenceman Niklas Kronwall, the other Swede patrolling the blueline for his NHL team, the one not named Nicklas Lidstrom. In fact, about the only thing the two share is a similar first name (although the spelling is slightly different) and a heritage.
Whereas Lidstrom is one of the steadiest, smartest rearguards in the game, he plays the classic "contain" style. He makes excellent first passes, eats minutes and generally plays a textbook style of defence. Pretty soon, he'll be in the heady company of Bobby Orr and Doug Harvey in terms of the number of times they have won the James Norris Memorial Trophy.
Kronwall is different. Less is known about him because he always seems to be hurt, suffering one freak injury after another, year after discouraging year. It's contributed to his anonymity and obscures the fact that he plays more like Ulf Samuelsson than Anders Eriksson; he is arguably Detroit's most physical defenceman since Vladimir Konstantinov was lost after that limousine accident.
Babcock put it this way: "The dimension that makes him different than Rafi [Brian Rafalski] and Nick is, he's out there hunting you down. He's looking for you. He's going to hit somebody in this series."
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True to Babcock's prediction, Kronwall crushed the Dallas Stars' Antti Miettinen with a bone-jarring, open-ice hit in the opener, won 4-1 by Detroit, which set the physical tone for the series.
Kronwall is mostly partnered with Brad Stuart, the former Los Angeles Kings defenceman, who has gone from worst to first in the span of fewer than two months. Stuart's Kings were in contention for the first overall pick in the entry draft. Now, he is only six victories away from his first Stanley Cup championship.
Stuart and Kronwall bring a physical dimension to a Red Wings defence corps that was mostly lacking last year. Kronwall was out for the playoffs because of an injury he'd suffered in the final month playing against Dallas; Stuart was playing for the Calgary Flames, Detroit's first-round opponents last year.
The Red Wings clearly liked what they saw in Stuart - after an injury to Robyn Regehr, he might have been Calgary's best defenceman in that playoff.
With them as a second pair, the Red Wings are deeper than they've been in years on the blueline; it is the one area in which they hold a distinct edge over the Stars. Dallas players say the fundamental difference between their opponents this round and last round, where they knocked off the favoured San Jose Sharks, is the Red Wings' commitment to defence.
It is the most overlooked and underrated part of their overall game. The temptation is to celebrate all their scorers. But the cold hard statistical facts tell a different story. Detroit gave up the fewest goals in the regular season; and they have given up the fewest goals in the playoffs thus far.
Accordingly, for the momentum in this series, which continued with the third game last night, to shift the Stars' way, they'll need to do a better job of penetrating that smothering Red Wings' defensive blanket.
"When you play a five-man game, it's mandatory - our best players have to be great defensively," Babcock said again yesterday morning, just in case the message hadn't sunk in yet. "That's just the way we do it. And when your best players play good defence in the front end, so that would be [Pavel] Datsyuk and [Henrik] Zetterberg, no one gets let off the hook.
"Our back end is mobile and gets the pucks. And everyone talks about how unphysical we are. But we had 39 finished checks last game. I think if you ask their "D," I don't think they would be telling you how unphysical we are."
No, they wouldn't and in fact, they didn't. The Stars were mostly saying nice things about the Red Wings, especially Mike Modano, the former captain, who mentioned again that in falling behind 2-0, it was as much about what Detroit was doing right in the series than about what Dallas was doing wrong.
"They've always been tough," Modano said. "They do take the body at times. They have some guys who play strong and make some hits, but they're not ones to get sucked into any undisciplined situations or react or get into kind of like, a street fight, like I said. So they play smart."
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